Normativity, rationality and the pragmatic turn

Thesis

The aim of the thesis has been to understand and develop the role of a notion of normativity as a foundation stone of a proper understanding of language and meaning. In particular I have sought to defend the thesis that normativity is constitutive of the linguistic; a thesis aptly captured by Charles Taylor's remark that to be a language user is 'to be sensitive to irreducible issues of rightness' (a thesis which I argue is indispensable to underwriting an appropriate epistemology of language - that we can have unreflective and unproblematic access to the meanings of our interlocutors' words).

This I have sought to achieve primarily by confronting the challenges a recent, and overwhelmingly plausible, trend in philosophical thinking about mind and meaning poses for an intuitive understanding of their normativity. This trend I have labelled 'the pragmatic turn', and which I clarify in terms of certain core commitments regarding the nature of a philosophical account of language owing largely to Wittgenstein and Davidson respectively. These commitments enable the formulation of a normativity problematic with which I have concerned myself- establishing how we can retain the thought that, as language users, we are distinguished by the normativity of the competencies involved when those competencies are geared to the practical realisation of our communicative aims.

What I am aim to establish is a notion of linguistic practice or speech action which (i) offers a model of communicative rationality which speaks directly to our overall concern with the normativity of language use; and (ii), is the centrepiece of a pragmatics which relates appropriately to the philosophical concern with meaning.

The main claim defended is that a notion of discursive rationality emerges from the framework of Austinian speech act theory, and, moreover, is an appropriate tool for the resolution of the identified normativity problem. I thus propose a qualified endorsement of an approach owed in large part to Habermas's concept of communicative action.

Authors: Bellorini, N; Bellorini, Nick

• Publication date: 2000
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Subjects: Standard language